How do you force a web browser to use POST when getting a url?

Question

How do you force a web browser to use POST when getting a url?

Answer 1

The above submitAsPost() function is a good and elegant solution but it has a problem - if the URL is too long some browsers (including Firefox and IE) will return an error. Since many of us use POST in order to bypass this very limitation, I suggest this solution:

// submit a URL using post
function submitAsPost(url) {
    var bodyTag = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];
    var postForm = document.createElement('form');
    bodyTag.appendChild(postForm);
    postForm.method = 'POST';

    var serverAndParams = url.split("?");
    postForm.action = serverAndParams[0];
    var params = null;
    try
    {
      var paramsAndHash = serverAndParams[1].split("#");
      params = paramsAndHash[0]; 
      var attrList = params.split("&");
      for (var i = 0; i < attrList.length; i++)
      {
        try
        {
          var keyValue = attrList[i].split("=");
          var el = document.createElement('input');
          el.type="hidden";
          el.name=keyValue[0];
          var value = keyValue[1];
          value = value.replace(/\+/g, ' ');
          el.value=decodeURIComponent(value);
          postForm.appendChild(el);
        }
        catch(error){}
      } 
    }
    catch(error){}

    postForm.submit();
    bodyTag.removeChild(postForm);
}

Tested with Firefox, Chrome and IE.